Angel of the Silences
by karabair
Summary: A look at Angel looking at Buffy, pre-"Innocence."


Title: Angel of the Silences  
  
Author: Karabair  
  
When?: BtVS, Season 2. Post-"Lie to Me"  
  
Who?: Angel and Buffy  
  
Why?: Because I'm a Spuffygirl, and I sometimes think I haven't been very fair to Angel, so I decided to delve into that pre-"Innocence" head and try to figure out what the boy was thinking.  
  
Disclaimers: Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy own the characters, though David Boreanaz owns that sort of puzzled "Oh, crap she expects me to SAY something" expression that more or less inspired this story. Counting Crows own "Angels of the Silences," and the lyric bits quoted in the chapter titles. But honestly, I've never heard the song and I gakked the title from Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River," before I realized he had gakked it from the Crows.  
  
1. Waiting for you  
  
"Angel -" Buffy stopped in the middle of a sentence. Literally stopped, so that Angel almost tripped over her. If he hadn't possessed such sensitive, catlike reflexes, they might have ended up tangled up on the moist midnight earth of the Sunnydale cemetery.   
  
Damn those reflexes, he thought. But it was too late to fake-stumble into her, and besides - "What's the matter, Buffy?"  
  
"Angel." She turned to face him and crossed her arms across her chest. "What are you thinking right now?"   
  
She had grown bolder with him lately, less accepting of his silences. He wanted to be happy about this. It showed a new trust, something he understood that he was supposed to be calling intimacy. Yet he knew that at this moment he would have to lie. There was no way he could explain what he has been thinking. He had begun with the best intentions of listening to her story, which involved a chemistry test, a broken number two pencil, and a frightening-sounding device called a "ScanTron."   
  
But his thoughts had veered off on a frolic of their own. He was nearing completion of a project months in the making. Like a gourmet savoring a fine sauce in order to discover the smallest ingredient, he was engaged in sorting, weighing, and measuring the hundreds of elements that made up her scent. He could recognize it, by now, from twenty yards away. Not merely the iron tang of warm blood, or the raw pungency of young female flesh that shifted with the changes of the moon. He knew all of it, the fine airborne bouquet that was peculiarly Buffy: the natural oils of her skin and hair, carrying hints of milk and ginger; the scents of ink and chalk dust from that awful school, the talcum powder of her mother's fabric softener; lipgloss, apple blossom shampoo, some oil called patchouli that she got from Jenny Calendar, a scent Angel almost choked on, that in itself he found more repellent than garlic, that somehow, put together with all the divergent elements, became essential to Buffy.   
  
He got all of this in her smell from a block away, and the closer they moved, the more powerful it became. And for the first time in a hundred years, he was able to view this ability as a gift instead of a freakish mutation: a disease that he would hack out of himself if he could, a body he would have destroyed so many times over, if he could only bear to face the sunlight. He wanted to grab her, pull her to him, and shout: I can be what I am, Buffy! You've showed me a way to be in this world, being what I am.   
  
Angel knew that he couldn't explain. If he tried, she would wrinkle her nose and say, "Gross." And this was a thing, one thing of many things, that he loved in her. A girl who could drive eight inches of pine squarely through the breastplate of the most vicious vampire, but could still show an unaffected schoolgirl disgust at something so mild. He couldn't tell her because she would laugh, she would blush. She would say "gross," she would take it wrong. She didn't need reminders of what he was. Better to stay silent, to believe that some small part of what he felt came through in the silence, than to take the risk of mucking it all up with words.   
  
"Nothing," Angel said. "You." He curled his hands around the back of her neck and leaned down to meet her mouth, letting all his worries tangle in the pleasant chaos of her smell.  
  
END PART ONE 


End file.
